This week on Cult of Mac’s podcast: We venture into very heart of Apple, inside Jony Ive’s super-secret design lab, and what we find is amazing. Plus: the best holiday iOS App Store deals and our favorite movies of 2015!
Our thanks to FreshBooks — the easy-to-use invoicing software designed to help small business owners get organized, save time invoicing and get paid faster — for supporting this episode. Get started with a free trial at Freshbooks.com/cultcast.
This post is brought to you by Code Atlas, maker of Veer.
Sometimes great innovations are really just refinements of something few would have thought of trying to improve. If you think Apple’s already figured out the best way of reaching out to your contacts in iOS 9, Veer will make you reconsider. It’s a novel new iOS app and Notification Center widget that blends seamlessly into your iPhone’s normal operations, simplifying and streamlining how we use the device to reach people.
In addition to rounding up the best stories of the year, we’re also showcasing the weirdest of 2015, and we can’t do that without including the sickest burns people laid down over the past 12 months.
It’s always strange when companies and CEOs snip and snap at each other like annoyed children. We should expect them to be above that sort of behavior, but guess what? They totally aren’t.
Here are some of the most blistering insults of the year.
If you want to work in an organization of any size, becoming fluent in project management is one of the most marketable skills you can acquire, This bundle of five classes, clocking in at more than 120 hours, offers a clear path to getting PMP® certification, and the pay bump that comes with. It’s an invaluable resume booster can be yours for only $39.
If you’re feeling guilty about your festive overindulgence, you may be planning to lose some weight and get fit in the new year. Well, sorry to be a Grinch, but research suggests that only 8 percent of New Year’s resolutions are successful.
The good news is that there is a better way. One that involves steadily building healthy habits over time. There are some handy iPhone apps that can help with this, but you won’t find them in the Health & Fitness section of the App Store.
If you got new devices for Christmas, don’t just put the old ones in a drawer — use Cult of Mac’s buyback program to get paid for them today!
It was a little tough to whittle our choices for the best movies of 2015 down to 11, but we did.
If you’d told us five years ago that we’d be getting new Jurassic Park, Star Wars and Mad Max movies, and that they’d all respect their predecessors while forging their own paths, we’d have ask the bartender for whatever you’d been drinking. But all of those things happened, and 2015 was better for it.
We also got some great original movies, including some charming comedies and one of the scariest monsters in recent memory. It was a pretty good time, regardless of your tastes, is what we’re getting at.
Here are our picks in no particular order.
For any mobile developer, learning Swift is a must. It’s an intuitive and fast language that’s key to iOS, OS X, tvOS, and watchOS. This bundle of four lessons — in the form of 3 apps and an E-book — will get you up to speed in practicing coding, testing scripts, and more. And the best part: the whole shebang is just $9.99.
This time of the year typically means gifts, both giving and receiving them. Surely some of you have gotten a brand new Macbook, iMac, iPhone or iPad (Pro, anyone?).
If so, you might be looking at a lovely morning playing with your shiny new toys. But where to start? What essential tweaks, software tricks and necessary little tips do you need to make sure they’re set up the right way?
Well, we’ve got your back, with roundups to help you easily set up your iPhone 6s or 6s Plus, iPad (Pro, Air 2 or mini), Apple Watch or new Apple TV the right way. Here’s the list of setup guides to get you up and running with your brand new Apple gear.
Happy holidays everyone, however you celebrate it: Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, kickin’ Kwanzaa and a tipsy New Year!
We trust you’re in the company of family and friends, stuffing your faces and giving and receiving in the best spirit of the holidays.
Things are going be quiet around here for a few days while we enjoy a short break. We have a great Mighty Mac Freebies giveaway and several more “best-of-the-year” posts coming up.
We’ll be back in the New Year with a bang from Las Vegas! We have a crew heading to CES 2016, bringing you all the best in tech.
Meanwhile, take it easy on the eggnog.
Leander Kahney
Editor & publisher
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, so we’ve decided to unleash our weekly magazine stuffed full of great Apple news, reviews, and how-tos for your yuletide pleasure.
This week, we’ve got a peek inside Apple’s super-secret Industrial Design team, the ten best iOS games from this past year, a plethora of setup guides for all your shiny Apple gear, and a look at some of the year’s most dedicated iFans.
Here’s the rundown this week.
Games is already one of the most popular categories in the Apple TV’s new App Store. Just two months after the set-top box’s release, the Games category is easily where you’ll find the most variety of apps so far.
Many are free while others are relatively expensive. But price isn’t necessarily an indicator of quality: These Apple TV games truly stand out for their innovative gameplay and sheer entertainment value. Take a look at Cult of Mac’s top picks.
The more our phones become a platform for high quality gaming, the less adequate the touch screen feels for keeping up. With the Phonejoy GamePad 2, your phone gains the precision and range of a full-fledged game controller. It’s an instant upgrade the way you interact with your phone, powered by Bluetooth and available for $59.99 at Cult of Mac Deals.
One of the most surprising movie flops of 2015 was Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs: a movie which, miraculously, earned even less for its creators than 2013’s panned Jobs, starring Dude, Where’s My Car‘s Ashton Kutcher.
Now the movie has received another ignominious fate: being singled out by major film critic and former co-host of At the Movies Rex Reed as his pick for no. 1 worst film of the year. Ouch!
Apple watchers should expect the company’s mobile payment service, Apple Pay, to expand to new markets in 2016 — with a heavy emphasis on Asia.
According to a new report, Apple is focusing on Asia and Europe since adoption in the United States has been slower than expected. Regions set to get Apple Pay next year so far include China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Spain.
Police in Tigard, Oregon have cracked an organized retail crime ring which used stolen gift cards worth three-quarters of a million dollars to buy iPhones bound for the Hong Kong black market.
Tigard Detective T.J. Hahn told the local KOIN 6 News that organized retail theft has become a bigger crime than even drug sales.
“This kind of activity makes millions of millions of dollars, into the billions,” he said.
Several thousand drone pilots registered their aircraft with the Federal Aviation Administration within the first 24 hours, but glitches in the system briefly shut it down after takeoff.
The FAA said the new mandatory online registration had to be shutdown for troubleshooting but would reopen Thursday.
Sometimes I’m browsing a site like Cult of Mac on my iPhone and I’m looking for something specific, like a story about encryption, for example. Instead of swiping down the page and hoping I see the story I’m looking for, I want to just search for it.
When you’re on your Mac, it’s super easy to find something like this: simply hit Command-F, type in the text string you’re looking for, and Safari (or any other web browser on the Mac, really) will find them all in the web page you’re on, highlighting them for you.
But what about finding stuff when browsing the web on your iPhone? There’s no Command-key on the built-in keyboard, so how do you search your favorite web page to find keywords?
Turns out, there are two ways to do it, which is kind of odd.
Let me just make this clear up front: HappySacs are little, elastic-banded bags that you put over your testicles. This is probably when you start wondering why a person would do such a thing, and nobody will blame you for thinking so.
But HappySacs have a noble mission in mind, and it extends even beyond comfort. These weird little pouches want to save your balls in both the short and long term. And they do so way less awkwardly than you might think.
Describing the funky weirdness of Katamari Damacy has always been somewhat of a challenge. You play a pill-headed little person who must roll a big sticky ball around various environments, picking up weird stuff like rice candy, cows, and pencils, while taking your quests from some odd king-looking dude who speaks in an odd, english as a second language-flavored patois.
It’s bizarre, but super fun, and its coming to a mobile phone near you as Tap My Katamari on iOS and Android. Check out the teaser trailer below.
Robots are cool, but there are some things visionary engineers in the robotics field should not mess with – like eight tiny reindeer.
Boston Dynamics put their famous robotic dogs through another test – harnessing three Spot bots to a sleigh, pulling a waving Santa-like figure (not the real Santa, but a real person dressed as Mrs. Claus). The Google-owned company posted a video on YouTube of the prancing robo dogs, apparently showing the world once again that even the job of Rudolph can be replaced by a robot.
China’s Foreign Ministry said today that U.S. tech companies have nothing to fear from the country’s new anti-terrorism law, which could require companies to create “back doors” in products, or to hand over encryption information to the Chinese government.
In this age of cyber theft, keeping your passwords on a pad of paper or (even worse) an online document just won’t cut it, no matter how indecipherable you might think they are. Sticky Password offers a new solution for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android users. And right now you can get a lifetime subscription for just $24.99.
Forget The Ed Sullivan Show, The Beatles are coming to Apple Music, Google Play, and a variety of other online streaming music services — and just in time for Christmas, too.
Starting Christmas Eve, the Fab Four will be available for your listening pleasure on Apple Music, Spotify, Slacker, Tidal, Microsoft’s Groove, Rhapsody, Deezer, Google Play, and Amazon Prime.
Apple fans are some of the most dedicated in all of tech (some might even call them a cult), but a few enterprising and/or desperate people really outdid themselves this year.
Not that we can really blame them. Cupertino brought the heat this year with the Apple Watch, a cool new Apple TV, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, and the massive iPad Pro. We can forgive the superfans for really going all out to get their hands on the latest iGear. But some of their efforts might have been a bit too enthusiastic.
Here are some times when people’s love of Apple outweighed logic this year.